Number one best-selling author and ultimate thriller writer Jeffery Deaver returns with a new Lincoln Rhyme investigation. Rhyme and Amelia Sachs' latest case: catching a terrifying killer targeting couples.... The happiest time of their lives - will be their last. William and Anna went to collect her engagement ring. One and a half carats, almost flawless. But the Promisor had other ideas for their future.... Their murder - and that of the diamond cutter they were visiting - is only the first of a series of macabre attacks.

Amos Decker is a former professional football player whose career was ended by a terrible hit. Now a police detective, Amos is still haunted by a side effect from the accident he can never forget. One night Decker comes home from a stakeout to find his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law horrifically murdered. Obviously scarred and nearly broken, Decker has to use his skills as a detective and his unusual brain capacity to try to catch the monster who killed his family.

Taylor Lockwood spends her days working as a paralegal in one of New York's preeminent Wall Street law firms and her nights playing jazz piano anywhere she can. But the rhythm of her life is disrupted when attorney Mitchell Reece asks her to find a stolen document that could cost him the multimillion-dollar case he's defending...and his career as well. Taylor signs on...only to find that as she delves deeper and deeper into what goes on behind closed doors at Hubbard, White & Willis, she uncovers more than she wants to know.

A trio of desperate convicts has hijacked a bus carrying a group of deaf and mute schoolgirls who are now being held hostage in a disused slaughterhouse. FBI agent Arthur Potter is flown in to negotiate with the men, as are local police, state troopers, politicians and the media. Not everyone has the same agenda. And the killers will kill one innocent child an hour, on the hour, until their demands are met.

New York City is thrown into chaos by the assaults of the Bone Collector, a serial kidnapper and killer who gives the police a chance to save his victims from death by leaving obscure clues. The cops go to Lincoln Rhyme, an ex-NYPD forensics expert left paralysed after an accident on the job. Rhyme reluctantly postpones his ambitions towards suicide and puts together a forensic investigation team, enlisting as his eyes and ears young police officer Amelia Sachs.